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Open Poetry #34
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Huan Yi
Member Ascendant
since 2004-10-12
Posts 6688
Waukegan

0 posted 2004-12-05 01:28 PM




How light glistens
on the water

Wooden houses
with paper walls
small rock gardens
and slate gray roofs

Grocery stores
Their open stalls
Mama Sans at local bars
Small white dogs
and cobbled roads

Paddy fields
Koto tunes
Summer hills
The autumn moon...

I will miss you
when I’m dead


  


© Copyright 2004 John Pawlik - All Rights Reserved
serenity blaze
Member Empyrean
since 2000-02-02
Posts 27738

1 posted 2004-12-05 06:53 PM


hmmm.

The images are lovely and quite at odds with the closing, so I confess I can't quite claim to understand this on an intellectual level, but at the same time, something on an emotional level sort of nodded at the apparent irony.

(not even sure if irony is the right word)

Perhaps you could enlighten me a bit regarding this one? I do enjoy your explanations, even when they are beyond me.


GG
Member Elite
since 2002-12-03
Posts 3532
Lost in thought
2 posted 2004-12-05 08:48 PM


Think I'll agree with Ser on this one.
It definitely pinched a nerve emotionally...
left with an underserved untimely
stealing of what 'should have been.'
Yet confused by what the real meaning,
or inspiration, might have veen.

Guess I'm not always required to know.
Even confused, I like this poem.

Always, Alyssa

He was a man of sorrows
...I am a girl of tears.

Huan Yi
Member Ascendant
since 2004-10-12
Posts 6688
Waukegan
3 posted 2004-12-05 11:40 PM


serenity blaze/ Alyssa,

This particular thing is a response to Alan Booth
as I met and walked with him in his “Looking for the Lost”
(ISBN: 1568361483).  To quote one of the reader reviewers
at Amazon:  

“Looking for the Lost is an oddity. A book that I remember few details of, yet I remember with great vividness that I was moved by a intangible sadness that was always just over the next horizon of his journeys. Alan Booth was a writer of invincible good humor. Too much so to speak of his own impending death. . .  But the alert reader is constantly aware of an impending passing of life, seemingly inseparable from the passing of beauty in this country.”

Until the end he never speaks of his illness, (a cancer that took him at 48
which he eventually alludes to), yet in and between the lines there is a
sense of leave taking.  It’s a very quiet, almost ineffable, experience yet
one which I, at least, through re-reading have felt the urge to more than once.
In the poem  “Silence” Edgar Lee Masters asks:

“For the depths,
Of what use is language?”

Alan seems to have known that to attempt to speak directly is to
then use words as can only, at best, touch and more often distract
and/or detract from and thereby diminish, if not deny, the experience of
those depths.  So instead you walk with him and within his words feel
his being , his affection for life, and his goodbye.


If my thing causes some interest, then I’m pleased.

John

P.S.

  
http://www.daypoems.net/poems/1495.html


passing shadows
Member Empyrean
since 1999-08-26
Posts 45577
displaced
4 posted 2004-12-11 08:30 AM


love that ending!

yes!

Drauntz
Member Elite
since 2007-03-16
Posts 2905
Los Angeles California
5 posted 2007-04-28 08:48 PM


nice.****
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